


Family Connection

by El Staplador (elstaplador)



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Community: ladiesbingo, Embarrassing Relatives, F/F, Fast talking, Gen, Sea-Devils, Souvenirs, Tourist Traps, pessimism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-09-01 03:09:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8604781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elstaplador/pseuds/El%20Staplador
Summary: Madame Vastra has to sort out a little disturbance in the Solent. For the ladiesbingo prompt 'Island'





	

Jenny's presence was most irregular, of course; but somebody, somewhere, had picked up the idea that Madame Vastra _could not do_ without Miss Flint. (It was not, Jenny thought privately, so far from the truth as all that.) Miss Flint was her... translator? her guide? See how Madame Vastra leans on Miss Flint's arm. Of course she must come in. And so here she was, listening to this anxious little man from the Admiralty.

'The Solent... ships attacked... yachts sunk... the men talk about some sort of sea monster... _amphibious._.. Cowes Week... worse, Osborne House... Imagine it, these creatures on the lawn!... we can _not_ have her majesty alarmed!'

The man stuttered to a stop like a clock running down.

'Perhaps,' Madame Vastra suggested, 'you might start from the beginning? Just the facts, please.'

The facts, it transpired, boiled down to the following:  
\- three nights  
\- one battleship attacked  
\- five yachts destroyed  
\- eighteen dead  
\- fifty-three injured  
\- ninety-eight subtly different accounts of the attacks  
\- several very worried naval officers

Somebody had looked at that list and said, 'Oh, you want Madame Vastra'. And so here she was.

  
Madame Vastra asked for the transcripts of the eyewitness accounts, and, after a little thought, the charts of the Solent. ('My dear, they say it only became an island a few thousand years ago; it might as well have been yesterday.') She insisted on interviewing such crew members as were to be found in London, and all day a procession of nervous sailors trooped up and down the front steps.

Late in the afternoon, Jenny brought fresh coffee and asked how matters progressed.

'It's as I thought,' Vastra said. 'They're cousins of mine, which makes it awkward.'

'Perhaps, madame,' Jenny suggested, 'you might do better not to tell the Queen that.' She didn't seriously think that they'd be meeting the Queen, but you never knew, with Madame.

'Oh, very distant cousins. But I fancy that we'll understand each other. Pass me that Bradshaw, my love – at least – tell me, how does one get to the Isle of Wight?'

  
Bradshaw obliged, and the next day saw them aboard a paddle steamer. The crossing was uneventful, save for the fact that Madame Vastra spent much of it leaning over the rail dropping small objects off the side. Jenny, holding Madame's parasol and keeping a lookout for people who might take exception to this, couldn't quite see what they were. They might have been stones. On the other hand, they might not.

  
The cliffs were striped red, brown, yellow, black bands of chalk that ran out into pools of equally brightly-coloured sand along the beach.

'In my time,' said Madame Vastra, 'all this was horizontal.'

Jenny tipped her head sideways and tried to imagine it.

'Other way. I think. And it didn't look like this then, of course. Not so much sea, for a start.' She prodded a strand of seaweed with the point of her parasol. With her other hand she caught at the fringe of her veil, then, seeing that the sand-collectors were all intent on their task at the far end of the beach, let it stream backwards off her face.

'Did you ever come here?' Jenny asked.

'No,' she said, absent-mindedly severe. 'I've read about it.' She turned to Jenny. 'You must hide. They will trust me little enough if I am alone.'

'Weapons, madame?' Jenny asked.

'No. Violence will provoke them.' Vastra squinted against the brightness of the gleaming Solent as Jenny took cover behind an upturned boat. 'I arranged to meet them here. Where are they?'

As if conjured by her words, a little swirl began to form in the water, perhaps fifteen feet from the shore. They watched as the turbulence grew. Out of the water came a head, shoulders... but what a head, what shoulders! Not at all like Madame, Jenny thought. It was more than half fish, though it stood on two legs like a man or an ape. Behind it came more. Jenny, fascinated and horrified, could not turn her face away.

'Greetings, brothers!' Vastra called. There was a gaiety in her voice that Jenny knew to be assumed. 'How many of you can we expect?'

The leader spoke. The voice came in a watery hiss. 'We seven come; we represent five hundred.'

The tension in Vastra's shoulders relaxed ever so slightly. 'You are in shallow waters. Why do you wake so early?'

'Our base drifted. We found ourselves in a morass of human activity. Where are we?'

'They call this the Solent,' Vastra called back. 'In our time there was no water here. When our time comes again, the water will have risen and your conquest will be easy.'

Murmurings of dismay. 'Then is it not the time to wake?'

Vastra shook her head. 'Of all our kind, there is only me awake now.'

There was no hope of distinguishing a facial expression on the thing, but its posture and the tone of its voice bespoke suspicion. 'Then why do you wake?'

'An accident. I and my sisters – but they were killed.' Madame Vastra shook her head as if to stop the invaders approaching further. 'There were not enough of us. There are not enough of you. I alone watch, and warn those who wake early. There is but one of me and few enough of you. I beg you, rest again. Find deeper waters. Find somewhere you can sleep and not be disturbed by this petty human traffic.'

'Peace-loving land-dweller! Coward! We stay and fight!' the leader growled.

'There are millions of these humans.' There was an urgency in Vastra's voice that frightened Jenny. 'If you fight, you die. If you die, the earth can never be ours again. They will pick us off, one by one, ten by ten, hundred by hundred. Believe me – you must wait!'

The words echoed across the water and were carried away by the wind.

For a long moment, none moved – not the land-reptile, not the sea-reptiles, not the mammal. Then the leader nodded. 'Very well. But when the time comes for war – we will be ready!'

Jenny watched as the monsters turned and retreated into the sea. 'Well,' she said, coming out from behind her boat when she was sure that they were out of earshot, 'that didn't really solve anything, did it?'

Vastra was watching the breakers splashing harmlessly on the beach. 'Perhaps not,' she said dryly, 'though it will at least have postponed the problem until after Cowes Week. Cowes Week 2098, if my understanding is correct.'

'What do they want?' Jenny asked. 'You said they had woken early.'

'The time will come,' Vastra said, 'when my race, and that of my cousins under the waves, will reclaim the earth. Or try to, at least,' she amended. 'And when that happens, there will be war. Unless your kin have already done the job for us.'

'Aren't you going to try to stop it?'

'My love,' Vastra said, 'I said to my brother there: there is only one of me. There are hundreds of thousands of my kin sleeping in caverns under land and sea. I could not stop it.'

'You could...' Jenny began, and did not finish.

'Ask your people to destroy my people, or ask my people to destroy your people?' Vastra said sadly.

'I see,' Jenny said. 'No. All you can do is put it off, a little.'

Vastra was still looking out to sea. 'It will come. It must come. Perhaps by the time it does we will have learned how to talk to each other. But the time is not yet, and there is no sense in hastening it. Besides,' she added, 'you have been kind to me.'

Jenny was not sure whether she meant _you humans_ or _you, Jenny_ , and perhaps it didn't really matter, after all. She bought a little bottle filled with the different coloured stripes of sand; but by the time they had got back to London the colours had all mixed together.

Madame Vastra kept it on the mantelpiece anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> Most of the action takes place at [Alum Bay](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=alum+bay+sand&client=firefox-b&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi-3LeZ7rfQAhWrLsAKHW0wDFsQsAQIQg&biw=1280&bih=890) on the Isle of Wight.


End file.
